Talk:Hall of Records/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Ffranc (talk · contribs) 14:13, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll review this. At a quick glance it looks very solid. I'll look through the sources and post whatever issues I might find here tomorrow. Ffranc (talk) 14:13, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

• There are several links to redirect pages, like Richard William Howard Vyse, biblical flood and 3rd millennium. They should preferrably be harmonised with the pages they redirect to in some way. (Possibly with the exception of Surid ibn Salhouk, where I suspect it's the target article that should be moved, which would be outside the scope of this review.)

I've changed some, but the exact wording of Genesis flood narrative doesn't fit into this context, so I just changed it to be closer to the article title. (Similar with reincarnation, which I added as part of other changes.) With names of centuries and millennia, my usual practice since a previous FAC has been to write them all out in words; the FA reviewer only asked for consistency, and using numbers for single digits just feels kind of weird to me.

Piped links are perfectly fine, I just didn't like the redirections. But even they aren't really a problem for GA.

• Is it possible to add something about how Cayce's ideas were spread initially? Were his readings published in books or periodicals, or did someone else write about them? You could also mention when the Association for Research and Enlightenment was founded. Right now, the article jumps directly from the readings in the 1930s and 1940s to radar surveys in 1978, with nothing about how anyone even knew about Cayce.

I've added more context about Cayce and his following.

• Is there nothing in reliable sources about the search for Cayce's two other halls? They have obviously received less attention than the Egyptian one, but the way the article is framed they're also relevant.

The problem with the three sites of records is that the Giza site seems to have received the most attention, not only from Cayce's adherents but in the readings themselves, and the specific phrase "hall of records" seems to have only been applied to the Giza site. Bimini (as my edits have now clarified) was the claimed site of Atlantis itself, and hence a somewhat different beast—anyone looking there is looking for Atlantis in general and not just its records. Cayce enthusiasts have adopted the "Bimini Road" as evidence that Cayce was right, but although the road is a somewhat well-known example of pseudoarchaeology, the standard handbooks of pseudoarchaeology (Fagan and Feder) only discuss it in passing. Other sources may be out there, but it doesn't seem that whatever activities the ARE may have carried out there are as well-documented as those at Giza.

Cayce may have envisioned the Yucatán repository as more analogous to the hall at Giza, but he doesn't seem to have given as much detail about it. Given the size of the Yucatán Peninsula, his fans probably don't want to deal with the needle-in-a-haystack problem. Cayce did say (if I'm understanding his wording correctly) that stones from the temple that served as the Atlantean repository there had been, or would be at some point, investigated archaeologically and taken to several American museums. But Lawton and Ogilvie-Herald say "as far as we can ascertain no one has yet traced these Yucatan temple stones with their 'emblem' to any of the locations suggested."

All right, it's more clear now. Thanks for the further information.

These are just reflections, not necessary for GA.

• The influence section goes through various theories and surveys at Giza that seem to only be vaguely related to the Hall of Records. At the end of the section, there is an argument about how the Hall of Records was important for these people as a possible physical evidence in support of their claims. It might be more clear why Hancock et al. are relevant for the topic if this explanation comes first, as an introduction to that part of the article.

I'd like to keep the wording of the quotation from Colavito, and I couldn't really think of a way to integrate it into the beginning of the "Influence" section. But I added a summary of it to the lead section; I hope that makes the connections somewhat clearer.

• The scope of the article comes off as a bit unclear. It's about Edgar Cayce's Hall of Records, but has more coverage of theories from the 1990s for which the Hall of Records belonged to a complex of similar precursors. The cut-off between precursors, article subject and influence seems a bit arbitrary. The article would just need a few tweaks and reshuffling of the headings to make another part of it the main subject, and incorporate the part about Cayce into the section about precusors or followers. I don't know how to resolve this, and it's not necessary for GA anyway.

I see your point about the scope, but it's a result of the strange way the topic evolved, and it's difficult to avoid. Happenstance brought the sphinx water erosion hypothesis, the Orion correlation theory, and the Hall of Records into the public eye at the same time, and since then they've been intertwined. As the article states, Cayce's statements about the hall caused people who originally were more interested in the other two hypotheses to adopt his 10,500 BC date. And (this is my insight, so I can't state it in the article) the reinforcement from the other two hypotheses gave the Hall of Records far more publicity than the similar claims by Randall-Stevens and Lewis, and also established it as a distinct topic from the rest of Cayce's Atlantean fantasies, sought by people who didn't necessarily have great interest in Cayce's other works. There wouldn't be an article about the hall if that hadn't happened.

But the OCT, the SPWEH, and the HOR did originate separately, even if they all ultimately derive from the idea that Egypt was an offshoot of a precursor civilization, so it makes sense that WP has three separate articles for them. (This one was created in 2005, the OCT in 2008, and the SPWEH in 2012, and nobody seems to have attempted to treat them all in one.) Here I've tried as much as possible to focus on searches for the hall, and only discuss the OCT and SPWEH where they directly interacted with the claims about the hall, though I'd be open to specific suggestions if anything seems really out of scope.

A. Parrot: If there is nothing useable published about how Cayce's ideas spread before 1978 or about his other halls, then there's pretty much nothing to do here before I can promote the article. My reservations above are not strong enough to make it fail 3b (focus on the subject). The sources look good and the ones I read match the article's text. Everything is well-written, neutral and has a good structure. The pictures are suitable and free to use. Ffranc (talk) 12:46, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I had very little to complain about and it has all now been addressed. Excellent work! Ffranc (talk) 14:34, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.